Forensic Probe Uncovers $5M Milei Libra Deal Document

A forensic investigation into the Javier Milei Libra scandal has surfaced what Argentine investigators believe may be the most direct evidence yet: a document recovered from the phone of crypto lobbyist Mauricio Novelli, laying out an alleged $5 million payment arrangement tied to Milei's now-infamous promotion of the Libra memecoin. The file was uncovered during a forensic review of devices seized from Novelli, conducted by Argentina's Directorate of Technological Support for Criminal Investigations — known as DATIP — which operates under the country's Public Prosecutor's Office. Argentine investigative outlet El Destape broke the story exclusively on Saturday, and if the document holds up to scrutiny, this is a different kind of evidence than the circumstantial trail investigators have been piecing together since February 2025. It's not phone metadata or financial flows. It's a written agreement with a price tag.

The Document: A Three-Tier Payment Blueprint

The file was created on February 11, 2025 — three days before Milei posted about Libra on X. Written in English, it opens with the line 'Hello friends, this is the final agreement discussed with H' and then breaks down a layered payment structure that reads less like a casual memo and more like a compensation script for a coordinated, paid promotional campaign at the highest levels of a national government.

Tier one: $1.5 million in liquid tokens or cash as an advance payment. Tier two: another $1.5 million, triggered specifically when Milei publicly announced Hayden Davis as his personal adviser on X — a performance milestone, essentially. Tier three: a final $2 million, contingent on a formal blockchain and AI consulting contract signed in person by Milei himself, with review by both the president and his sister Karina Milei. The structure is meticulous. Each tranche is tied to a verifiable, public action by the Argentine president.

The 'H' referenced throughout the document is believed by El Destape to refer to Davis, the CEO of Kelsier Ventures and the central architect behind Libra's creation. The document does not specify who exactly would receive the payments, but El Destape reported that the $5 million total appears to correspond to amounts intended for the Milei siblings and the network of intermediaries connecting them to Davis's operation — including Novelli, Manuel Terrones Godoy, and Sergio Morales.

That $5 million figure has come up before. Argentine entrepreneur Diógenes Casares stated publicly after the scandal broke that he had been told a senior government official received a payment of exactly that amount in connection with Libra. Despite his name appearing in court filings by plaintiffs in the criminal case, Casares has never been summoned as a witness. That gap in proceedings is conspicuous and, frankly, deserves far more scrutiny than it has received from commentators who have been content to focus on the token price charts.

Prosecutors will have to determine whether the document was actually executed or merely drafted — and whether the person who created it had the standing to bind any of the parties named. But the specificity of the tiers, and the date stamp three days before the fateful X post, makes it extremely difficult to dismiss as coincidental.

What Do the Call Records Reveal?

The document is damaging on its own terms. But the forensic call logs recovered from the same devices tell a parallel story that is even harder to explain away. Milei published his post about Libra memecoin at 7:01 PM Argentine time on February 14, 2025. In the minutes immediately before and after that post, Novelli and Milei exchanged a flurry of calls — multiple conversations compressed into the window between 6:54 PM and 7:03 PM. Nine minutes. Novelli then attempted to reach Karina Milei; she returned his call at 7:17 PM, and the two spoke for over two minutes.

When Libra's price began collapsing that same evening, the circle of communications widened quickly and in telling directions. Between roughly 10 PM and midnight, Novelli spoke with presidential adviser Demian Reidel, Julian Peh of KIP Protocol, and Santiago Caputo — one of Milei's most senior political strategists and a figure who rarely surfaces in public-facing communications. The calls between Novelli, Caputo, and Peh continued in rapid succession past midnight as the scale of the crisis became impossible to contain.

At 12:36 AM on February 15, KIP Protocol published a public statement claiming Libra was a success and insisting that Milei had no involvement in its development. Two minutes later — exactly two minutes — Milei himself posted that he had merely shared what he believed was a private sector venture and that he had no connection to the project. The coordination in timing is not subtle. Someone was running point on the response.

A separate note dated February 16, 2025 — also recovered from Novelli's phone — appears to contain a draft public statement for Milei, designed to contain the fallout from the previous 48 hours while maintaining deniability. The note reportedly includes language expressing support for Libra while denying financial involvement, and it was flagged by investigators for the single line that precedes it: 'this is the only thing that saves him, me, and us.' That phrase alone tells you how the people closest to the situation assessed the legal exposure at the time.

This is the only thing that saves him, me, and us.

How Did Libra Collapse — and Who Got the $107 Million?

To understand why investigators are pressing this case so hard, it helps to recall what the Libra token actually did to the people who bought it. Following Milei's post on the evening of February 14, 2025, the token briefly climbed to a market cap above $4 billion. Then it fell off a cliff — a collapse of more than 90% that wiped out retail investors across Latin America who had piled in after seeing their own head of state endorse the coin on social media.

Eight wallets linked to the project cashed out $107 million during that narrow window of elevated prices, according to reporting by The Block. That is not ambiguous. That is a coordinated exit from a token that was publicly endorsed by a sitting president, executed while ordinary investors were still buying in. The central question the investigation is trying to answer is whether that endorsement was part of a prearranged, compensated deal.

An Argentine congressional committee concluded in November 2025 that Milei provided 'essential collaboration' for the project and recommended that Congress evaluate whether his actions constituted misconduct in office. Milei has consistently and publicly denied any wrongdoing throughout the proceedings.

Earlier this month, forensic analysis reported by Argentine outlet La Nación found that Novelli and Milei exchanged at least five messages at 7:01 PM on February 14 — the exact moment the Libra contract address was posted on X. Experts who testified before Argentina's Congress confirmed that the contract address was not publicly accessible on the internet at the time Milei shared it, which directly contradicts his stated explanation that he simply found it online. That detail matters enormously, because it goes to the question of how Milei obtained the contract address in the first place.

Where Does the Milei Investigation Stand Today?

Argentina's Anti-Corruption Office cleared Milei of violating public ethics rules back in June 2025, concluding his Libra post was a personal action rather than an official one. That finding may hold in an administrative sense — but a federal criminal investigation and a U.S. class action lawsuit are both still very much active, and criminal proceedings operate under a fundamentally different evidentiary standard than administrative ethics reviews. The Anti-Corruption clearance is not the end of this story.

Milei's government also disbanded its own internal task force investigating the Libra scandal in May 2025. The timing is conspicuous. The task force was shut down just days after a federal judge ordered the president's and Karina Milei's bank records unsealed — the kind of sequencing that prosecutors tend to notice.

And then there is the question of what Davis knew and when. The Kelsier Ventures CEO previously admitted on camera that his team 'sniped' Libra at launch — meaning they positioned wallets to profit before retail buyers could react to the presidential endorsement — and acknowledged controlling wallets holding over $100 million in proceeds from the token. Davis has said this openly. That admission should have been the end of any public uncertainty about whether Libra was designed to benefit insiders. Instead, the scandal has continued to grow.

The newly surfaced document does not by itself prove that Milei accepted money. What it establishes is that someone operating within his immediate circle — close enough to exchange calls with the president in the nine minutes surrounding his X post — was drafting the terms of a $5 million compensation arrangement three days before that post went live. A federal judge and federal prosecutors will now weigh that document against everything else they have collected. The evidence trail is getting harder to walk away from with each new forensic finding.